Lawrence Lessig has posted a review of David Halperin's recent book, Digital Barbarism.

Halperin, who authored the (in)famous New York Times article calling for perpetual copyright, has now compiled his ideas into a book. Lessig offers a much-needed critique, including citing misconceptions about Creative Commons (Halperin conflates it not only with "freeware" with software... more

Wroclaw, a city in the South-West of Poland, is with every passing week becoming more saturated with Creative Commons music. Every Saturday in October and November, in a club called Fuzon, two local independent acts play at a "Creative Commons Party".

"The idea of this project grew up in our heads mainly because of our close contacts with young local music bands, who many times face financial problems - with recording the music in good quality, with organizing concerts on their own, with making and releasing demos, EP's or albums. And this all - such trivial problems - blocks both their creativity and their possibilities of popularity. That is why we created a kind of platform which enables them presenting themselves and promoting their music without usual costs. Our second aim was to show what the free culture idea is - that it is not thieving or piracy, but it is a new kind of freedom - to create, to present your artwork to the global public and to get to know, what create other people in the world".

The first CC Party has been filmed by Toyotaka Ota, who runs Wroclaw Weekly, an English-language website that "helps you exploring Wroclaw cultural scenes inside out". As part of his site, Toyo regularly creates video podcasts of events taking place in town, which he makes available online under a CC licence. Take a look at the CC Party video, an informative short film that in my opinion proves the usefulness of this type of format - a lightweight, iPod compatible, 5 minute-long video gives you short coverage of the bands Kredenz and Percival Schuttenbach in action, and a bit of information about Creative Commons as well. And the next CC Party videos are in production...

The band Kredenz, featured in the party video, is also a host of the event, and usually plays with a guest band each week. During each party, worldwide CC-licenced music and videos are also shown to the guests. And the organizers manage to sneak in a bit of information about Creative Commons and the idea of free culture, as well. As Malgorzata said, "Organizing such events is the best way to show young artists - the ones who participate in it and the others, who just observe - what the CC idea means, how it works in practise and above all - how it might be useful. In other words - it's the best way to convince people, that it really works."

They also wrote a special script which enables them to show all information about the authors and types of licences on the screens simultaneously with music tracks. The other thing is, the concerts are being recorded, retransmitted on the radio, and then parts of the live recordings are issued as CC-licenced online EPs.

The parties already have a large fan base - each Saturday about 100 people arrive and the club is quite crowded. The public is becoming more and more familiar with the idea of Creative Commons, and so are the bands - one of them (Rabastabarbar) has just published their other concert under CC licence and placed it on Jamendo.

The CC Party is a brilliant way of reaching out to young people, who otherwise wouldn't learn about CC. While they aren't as educational or informative as CC Salons, they are a great mix of promotion of commons-related ideas with some fun and entertainment.

When you do a show, do you have to pay the Collection Society for the use of the venues space ?
Are any of the bands with a collection society ?
How are you able to tell if a band is with a CS or not ?
I'm figuring that some of the bands are with a CS, I am thinking that this could create problems for CC Poland, as you might be seen to be encouraging music artists to use CC licenses.
Could this create some legal friction down the line ?
I created a space to let artists in Australia know about issues that relate to CS http://www.myspace.com/optoutofAPRA
I'm not directly involved with CC, I just reckon that CC is a good way to go for artists and i'm a music artist.

This is interesting info courtesy of Jessica Coates CC Australia

(1) If someone's already entered into a licensing deal before they join APRA, under standard contract law APRA would have to take the rights subject to that agreement. I suspect the APRA licensing agreement requires you to say you haven't assigned your rights previously before you can join. APRA have suggested to us before that if someone had CC licensed their work, they wouldn't accept them as members.

CC Australia have to be very neutral to the issue of APRA and CC. If they encouraged artists to use CC licenses this could have an effect on their other projects.